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Annex E: Summary of the Social Housing Professionalisation Review

Updated 28 March 2024

Applies to England

In this document, we set out the following:

• The background to the Professionalisation Review
• The Review’s key objectives and scope
• How we gathered evidence for the Review
• Key findings

Background

Following the Grenfell tragedy, significant concerns were raised about the competence and conduct of staff working in social housing. We heard that: tenants had not been listened to when they raised concerns, including about safety in the tower; complaints had not been properly dealt with; and some staff behaved unprofessionally and treated tenants with a lack of courtesy and respect. Evidence presented during Module 3 of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry supported this view and indicated that some Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation staff had not been suitably trained to carry out their roles effectively.

In 2017 we carried out extensive consultation with tenants across the country to inform the development of our Social Housing Green Paper. Ministers met almost 1,000 people – including the bereaved, survivors and residents from the Grenfell Community – and the Department reviewed more than 7,000 online submissions. What we heard showed that the experiences of Grenfell residents were replicated across the country, with residents reporting that they were talked down to or ignored by staff and contractors.

We committed in the Social Housing White Paper (2020) to review professional training and development to make sure residents receive a high quality and professional service. As set out in the White Paper, the purpose of the Review was to consider the appropriate qualifications and standards for social housing staff in different roles - including senior staff, who are responsible for managing their organisations effectively, overseeing training and development of frontline staff, and driving the culture change needed within organisations.

Professionalisation Review: objectives and scope

The Professionalisation Review commenced in January 2022. Its overall objective was to assess how we can achieve a more professional sector in which all staff act professionally, listen to their residents, and treat them with courtesy and respect.  The Review considered:

• Whether changes should be made to the sector’s recognised qualifications, training provision and ongoing professional development to make sure that housing services staff are equipped to provide a high quality and professional service.
• What other changes should be made to drive culture change within the sector as a whole, and at the level of individual landlords, in order to make sure residents are treated with courtesy and respect.
• The training and development required by staff to equip them to offer appropriate support to residents with mental health difficulties or those at risk of exploitation.
• The issues landlords face with recruitment and retention, and what approaches can be adopted to attract and retain the best people to sustain a high calibre social housing workforce.

For the purposes of the Review, ‘housing services staff’ were defined as those carrying out day-to-day housing management activities such as allocating housing, recovering rent arrears, providing appropriate tenancy agreements, managing, and organising repairs, providing housing support, information and advice, and dealing with problems between neighbours.

Staff employed by third party contractors engaged on behalf of landlords were within scope, as well as direct employees.

How we gathered evidence

To inform the Review’s considerations, we established an expert working group with its membership drawn from across the sector, including tenant representative organisations, professional bodies, housing academics, trade bodies, and a cross-section of landlords. The full list of working group members can be found as an Appendix 1 of this document.

The working group provided the Review with expertise, insight and challenge which enabled us to develop the most appropriate policy response to the issues identified through the Green Paper consultation, and which the Review had been established to explore and address. The group met six times between January and July 2022.

Working group meetings were supplemented with a number of further meetings, and engagement with organisations who are specifically focused on tenants’ perspectives, including the National Federation of Tenant Management Organisations, the TAROE Trust, Grenfell United and Shelter.

The Review team also carried out telephone interviews and fact-finding visits with individual landlords to discuss their approaches to staff development. This engagement allowed the Review team to explore approaches to housing qualifications, professional standards, continuous professional development and recruitment and retention. The visits also included meetings with tenants, with whom we discussed perceptions of staff professionalism and their experiences as service recipients. 

We carried out a series of interviews with senior executives from different providers to discuss the experiences and learning their organisations had gained through their adoption of the Chartered Institute of Housing’s revised professional standards, which were launched in March 2021. 

We also commissioned survey and case study research through IFF Research, to map the sector’s current qualifications and training landscape. The first phase of the research project involved an online survey with social landlords. Phase two of the research project involved in-depth case studies with social landlords, interviewing management, customer-facing staff, and residents to explore landlord’s approaches to staff development. The results of the research project were used to inform the work of the Review. The full report is published alongside this statement (Annex F).

As part of the wider Social Housing Quality Programme, DLUHC separately commissioned IFF Research to carry out a large-scale survey of residents. 5,000 residents responded to the survey, which included questions on whether residents felt the staff they interacted with acted professionally and treated them with respect.  A report of the survey findings has been published on gov.uk.

Key findings

The department used feedback from tenants, housing staff, sector experts and review participants to define professionalisation through four outcomes as set out below:

• residents are treated with respect and trust their landlord;
• frontline staff are empathetic and skilled in listening to residents, as well as having the practical skills and knowledge to deal with issues effectively;
• landlords deliver a consistently high-quality service; and
• internal systems and processes function effectively.

Qualifications and training

A primary consideration of the Review was whether professional qualifications should be mandatory across the sector as a means of driving up professionalism. There is no current statutory requirement for staff employed in housing services or management roles to hold qualifications.  Individual landlords as employers decide who they appoint and make their own assessments of the capabilities and behaviours they need and expect from staff. Landlords determine their own approaches to developing their staff in line with their requirements and expectations.

Review participants highlighted the value in promoting a holistic and flexible approach to professionalisation, given the diversity in the sector in terms of organisational structures, operating models, role types and services provided. This diversity is in part a result of the varying needs of the tenants who live in the sector. As a result, an overly prescriptive approach to qualifications and training for all staff including tenant-facing frontline staff could inhibit the flexibility of landlords to make sure staff are trained and developed in the most appropriate way for their roles and to meet the particular needs of their tenants. 

The working group emphasised that there was a need for a more robust and consistent approach across the sector to the delivery of training, increased opportunities for ongoing continuing professional development (CPD), and increased take-up of specialised training programmes, such as those related to supporting victims of domestic abuse and tenants dealing with mental health issues, to improve support for tenants with specific needs.  

IFF Research found that whilst CPD is generally encouraged and supported in the sector, there is scope to improve take-up of CPD, and it is not currently sufficiently embedded within day-to-day delivery. The Department heard through the Review that regular training and CPD is important to maintaining skills in the workforce. The working group suggested that clearer expectations or minimum standards for the amount of time that should be spent on training across organisations and in different roles could be helpful.

The Review found that, in general, professional qualifications could have significant benefits for housing management staff yet there was limited support for mandating qualifications for all staff in the sector. Mandating professional qualifications for a large proportion of the housing workforce was considered likely to have substantial impacts on recruitment, retention, and the delivery of services to tenants, given the time commitments and costs of undertaking qualifications. Although, the Review heard that if qualifications requirements were applied to senior managers this should be manageable for the sector, given these roles make up a smaller proportion of the workforce. It was noted that professional qualifications were particularly important for more senior staff, as well as those carrying out specialised or technical roles.

The Review heard from some participants that lapses in professional standards often stem from decisions made at a management level.^{[footnote 1]} It also found that organisational and management culture is a key driver of the professionalism of the overall service provided by landlords to their tenants. As senior executives and managerial staff play a major role in shaping the culture of their organisations, implementing mandatory qualifications at this level could be highly effective in driving up professionalism and culture change within organisations.

The impacts on recruitment and retention

Through the Review, the department heard that professionalisation could both support and hinder recruitment and retention in the sector, depending on the approach taken. It also heard that providers have varying experiences of recruitment, with smaller providers and those in rural areas finding it harder to recruit skilled staff. Although there was agreement that staff should be appropriately trained, and that stronger professional career pathways in the sector could help to attract good candidates, there was concern that mandating professional qualifications could deter or prevent some suitable candidates from entering the social housing sector and create further barriers to recruiting and retaining a skilled workforce. The importance of this issue was highlighted by IFF Research, which found that staffing shortages directly impact the ability of frontline staff to be able to provide a professional service to residents.

The Review found that these potential impacts could be addressed in a number of ways, including not mandating qualifications for more junior staff, and/or, for staff at any level, not requiring qualifications to be held at the point of recruitment into a specific role or entry into the sector.

It was acknowledged that opportunities for career progression, such as obtaining skills through continuing professional development, could also be a key driver for improving retention in the sector, depending on the approach taken. Members of the working group recommended that improving the training offer and advertising the profession amongst people in higher education could boost the attractiveness of a career in housing, in turn enabling landlords to deliver a more professional service. Others also highlighted the benefits of recruiting staff with personal experience of social housing, which has been shown to lead to improvements in treating residents with respect, empathy, and compassion.

Staff behaviours and attitudes

The Review heard that the behaviours and attitudes of housing management staff could be a more important aspect of professionalism than specialist skills and knowledge. The working group emphasised that treating tenants with empathy and respect and having good communication skills - attributes that are acquired through experience and training rather than formal education and qualifications - are particularly important to tenant satisfaction. 

The department commissioned a survey of residents to establish robust baseline metrics on the reforms the government is making to improve the quality of social housing. Fieldwork took place between 22 March and 11 May 2022. The survey provides recent evidence that the majority of residents are satisfied with their landlord’s professionalism and feel they are treated with respect. However, a significant minority are dissatisfied, demonstrating that many landlords need to do more to improve staff professionalism and make sure all staff treat residents with respect at all times. The survey found that:

• It was more common for residents to feel satisfied with their landlord’s professionalism: just over three-quarters (77%) were satisfied, of whom a third (34%) were very satisfied, but one in ten (10%) were dissatisfied.
• Two-thirds of residents (65%) agreed that their landlord treats them with respect, with a quarter (25%) strongly agreeing. However, more than one in ten (13%) disagreed.

The Review also heard that visible and active senior support for high professional standards was seen as vital to ensuring that staff at all levels are supported - through relevant training and development opportunities - to gain the skills, experience, and knowledge they need for their role, and to understand the behaviours expected of them. The working group supported the adoption of codes of conduct and/or ethics and values within organisations, such as those provided by the Chartered Institute of Housing, to drive culture change and embed appropriate values throughout organisations.^{[footnote 2]}

System constraints

The Review heard that, in order for professional standards to be improved, wider system constraints should be reviewed alongside the capabilities and behaviours of staff. The research we commissioned IFF Research to carry out suggested that tenants find the majority of frontline staff to be capable and respectful but consider that organisational systems and processes often prevent suitable action being taken by staff to resolve issues for tenants. Systemic barriers to delivery of professional services can include: a lack of effective mechanisms for tenants to provide feedback; slow or ineffective repair and maintenance services; inefficient IT systems that do not enable staff to deliver solutions; and staffing constraints.

This finding highlights the fact that the wider reforms we are making to drive improvements in landlords’ systems and processes will support the delivery of higher quality, professional services – including the move to proactive consumer regulation, and measures to improve complaints handling, reduce non-decency and set tougher safety standards.

Appendix 1 - Working Group members

• The Chartered Institute of Housing
• The National Housing Federation
• The National Federation of ALMOs
• Association of Retained Council Housing
• The Tenant Participation and Advisory Service
• The Institute of Customer Service
• Dr Helen Taylor, Lecturer at Cardiff Metropolitan University
• Dr Vikki McCall, Professor of Social Policy at the University of Stirling
• Riverside Housing
• Sanctuary Housing
• Sovereign Housing
• North Star Housing Group
• Midland Heart
• Grenfell United
• North Kesteven District Council
• Birmingham City Council
• Rethink
• Centre for Mental Health
• Other Housing Associations and Tenant Groups

1. Annex F – Social Housing Professional Review Report, page 52. ↩

2. https://www.cih.org/media/ugie0mtl/0330-code-of-conduct-v3.pdf; https://www.cih.org/publications/cih-code-of-ethics;https://www.cih.org/professional-standards ↩